EP39: Work From Home Injects Over $1 Trillion Into the Economy

<p style="text-align:center;"></p> <p style="text-align:left;"> </p> <p style="text-align:left;"> </p> <p>There's a whole bunch of commuters that are used to driving to cities. And I think it would be good and very timely talk a little bit about some of the things that we've learned and this massive economy that is forming from the non-commuter economy, the non-commuter economic forces. Chris will perhaps give us a little bit of hope, as far as what the trends are with this new stay at home economy.</p> <p>----more----</p> <p>In downtown Seattle, there are office buildings and those office buildings right now are pretty much empty as of today, July 14, 2020. And a lot of people thought this whole COVID thing would be over by now. I think with a record number of cases per day coming in or individual states like Florida are now number four in the world is where the country is. There's a kind of sobering up going on with regard to what’s happening. One of the interesting things is that we talked about it a little before is that the big companies always lead the way on this sort of thing for a bunch of reasons.</p> <p>One is they've got the best information.</p> <p>Two, they've got the best lawyers and their lawyers advise them as to what's why somewhat safe to do.</p> <p>Three, they can often work the numbers better than the rest of us. And so what to us might be a small saving to them can be quite material.</p> <p>Here's what we have today, roughly 48 million knowledge workers in America and they used to commute by car about 26 minutes each way.</p> <p>So that's .87 hours of car time commuting. Anybody who's lived near a big city and commutes knows that is an understatement. That's just over 200 hours spent commuting by car which adds up to about 10 billion hours for those 48 million knowledge workers.</p> <p>This has been time boldly wasted.</p> <p>Commuting and that multiplied by the $50 an hour that most knowledge workers are paid, which clearly is less than they're worth and nobody ever gets paid wh